Walls on the Peace Wall

All over the world, fences and walls are built to separate countries and people. The German photographer Kai Wiedenhöfer’s panoramic photographs of some of these walls, are now on display on the Peace Wall outside the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo.

When the Berlin wall fell in 1989, the young photo student, Kai Wiedenhöfer, was there with his camera. More than twenty years later, he documented the erection of the separation barrier in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and since then, he has photographed walls all over the world.

-I wanted to show that walls and fences are no solutions to today’s global, political and economic problems. The Berlin Wall is the best proof of this - peace begins where walls fall, not where they are erected, says Wiedenhöfer.

His photos of walls were shown for the first time in 2013, in the exhibition WALLonWALL, on a 364-meter-long part of the former Berlin Wall. The exhibition shown on the Peace Wall outside the Nobel Peace Center is a smaller version of this. The Peace Wall is the name of the building fence hiding the construction site for the New National Museum that is being erected in Oslo. It was turned into an arena for contemporary art in 2015, on initiative from the Nobel Peace Center in cooperation with the Norwegian Directorate of Public Construction and Property(Statsbygg). Thousands of people are passing by every day.

-WALLonWALL is an exhibition that will be clearly visible in the townscape of Central Oslo, and we want the photos to create discussions about how borders and walls are used to separate people and countries. Documentary photo has a central position at the Nobel Peace Center, and many of the photographs shown here are from countries and conflicts that are part of the history of the Nobel Peace Prize, such as Israel/Palestine and North- and South Korea, says Liv Astrid Sverdrup, Director of Exhibitions at the Nobel Peace Center.

WALLonWALL consists of big, panoramic photographs from Belfast (Northern Ireland) USA/Mexico, Spain/Morocco, North and South Korea, Israel/Palestine, Baghdad (Iraq), Cyprus, Greece/Macedonia and Berlin (Germany). All photos are taken in the period 2003-2016.

The exhibition on the Peace Wall is shown at the same time as the photo exhibition Shifting Boundaries inside the Nobel Peace Center, where 12 European photographers explore the theme of changing borders. 

WALLonWALL will open on Tuesday 17 October at 20.00. The artist will be present at the opening. For individual interviews with Kai Wiedenhöfer, please contact Ingvill Bryn Rambøl at ibr@nobelpeacecenter.org / +47 924 52 944. 

About the photographer:

Kai Wiedenhöfer is a German photographer born in 1966. He has received numerous awards, such as, the Leica Medal of Excellence, the Alexia Grant for World Peace and Cultural Understanding, World Press Photo Awards, the Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography and the Carmignac Gestion Photojournalism Award.

In December 2016, he received the Carl-von-Ossietzky Medal from International Human Rights League in Berlin.

Many of Wiedenhöfer’s projects are published as books: Perfect Peace (2002), Wall (2007) and The Book of Destruction (2010). The latter was shown in a solo exhibition at the Musée d ́Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. His fourth book, Confrontier, about separation walls worldwide, was published in 2013.